Ardor

THE PROGENITOR

The god at the origin of everything didn’t have a name but a title: Prajāpati, Lord of the Creatures. He discovered this when one of his sons, Indra, told him: “I want to be what you are.” Prajāpati asked him: “But who (ka) am I?” And Indra answered: “‘Exactly what you just said.’ So Prajāpati became Ka.”

Indra wanted his father’s “greatness” or, according to others, his “splendor.” And Prajāpati had no difficulty in divesting himself of it. So Indra became king of the gods, even though Prajāpati had been “the sole lord of creation.” But it was neither “greatness” nor “splendor” that made Prajāpati the “god alone above the gods,” a formula that smacks of incompatibility only for latter-day readers in the West. What Prajāpati could not renounce was something else: the unknown, the irreducible unknown. At the moment in which he knew he was Ka, Prajāpati became guarantor of the uncertainty involved in questioning. He guaranteed that it would always remain. If Ka didn’t exist, the world would be a sequence of questions and answers, at the end of which everything would be fixed once and for all—and the unknown could be erased from life. But since Prajāpati “is everything”—and Prajāpati is Ka—there is a question in every part of everything that finds an answer in the name of everything. And this in turn takes us back to the question, which opens onto the unknown. But this is not an unknown that is due to the inadequacy of the human intellect. It is unknown even for the god who includes it in his name. Divine omniscience does not extend to itself.

No wonder the gods, sons of Prajāpati, increasingly ignored their father, to the point of forgetting him. For a power to be exercised, it has to be based on certainty. And Prajāpati, though he was the one “whose commandments all the gods acknowledge,” had delegated the exercise of his sovereignty without raising any resistance. He had kept back for himself only the unknown, which was encapsulated in his name. An unknown that surrounded every certainty like an undrainable ocean lapping an island. For the administration of ordinary life, the preeminence of the unknown was a danger—and had to be obliterated. For the fathomless life of the mind—at the point where the mind reconnected with its origin, Prajāpati—it was the very breath of life. In the same way that Ka had been “the sole breath of the gods.”

* * *

Prajāpati: the creator god who is not entirely sure he exists. Prajāpati is the god who has no identity, who is the origin of all insoluble paradoxes. All identities arise from him, who himself has none. And so he takes a step back, or to one side, allowing the rush of mortal beings, ready to forget him, to carry on. But they will then return to him, to ask him the wherefore. And the wherefore can only be similar to what made them first emerge: a rite, a composition of elements, of forms, a temporary—the only—guarantee of existence. Compared with every monotheistic god, and with all other plural deities, Prajāpati is more intimate and more remote, more elusive and more familiar. Any reasoning person continually encounters him wherever speech and thought arise, wherever they dissolve away. That is Prajāpati.

The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa returns on innumerable occasions to the scene that takes place “at the beginning,” when Prajāpati “desired.” And on most occasions we read that Prajāpati wanted to reproduce himself, wanted to know other beings apart from himself. But there is a passage where it says that Prajāpati had another desire: “May I exist, may I be generated.” The very first being to be unsure of his own existence was thus the Progenitor. And he had good reason, since Prajāpati was an amalgam of seven ṛṣis, those “seers” who, in turn, had been seven “vital breaths,” though incapable of existing alone. Prior to the drama of things generated there was the drama of that which feared it could not exist. This was what forever marked Prajāpati’s character and made him the most phantom-like, the most anxious, the most fragile of all creator gods. He never resembled a sovereign who elatedly surveys his dominions. He left that feeling to one of his sons, Indra—and he pitied him for it. He knew that, along with euphoria, and bound up with it, Indra would face mockery and retribution.

To gather the difference between Prajāpati and the gods, it is enough to murmur a ritual formula. The low voice is indistinct—and that indistinctness already brings us in contact with the nature of Prajāpati, which is precisely this: indistinct. By playing with meter, with names, with formulas, with murmurs, with silence, the sacrificer manages to move about among the various forms of the divine. But, even in the case of the most elementary gesture, he will have to reach that vast, mysterious level, that indistinctness where he encounters only Prajāpati—and himself.

* * *

Unlike Elohim, Prajāpati does not have a hand in creation as a working craftsman, but is the process of creation itself: in it he is made and he is unmade. The further Prajāpati goes in creation, the more he is dismembered and exhausted. His view of what he does is never from the outside. He cannot look upon his work and say: “It is good.” As soon as he looks outward, he evokes another being, Vāc, the “second,” a column of water, which was a female, pouring between sky and earth. And immediately the two copulate. Prajāpati was so little external to his creation that, according to some texts, it was he himself who became impregnated: “With his mind he united with Vāc, Speech: he became pregnant with eight drops.” They became eight deities, the Vasus. Then he set them upon the earth. Copulation continued. Prajāpati was once again impregnated, by eleven drops. They became other deities, the Rudras. He then set them in the atmosphere. There was also a third copulation. And Prajāpati was impregnated by twelve drops. This time they were the Ādityas, the great gods of light: “He placed them in the sky.” Eight, eleven, twelve: thirty-one. Prajāpati was impregnated by another drop: the Viśvedevāḥ, All-the-gods. They had reached thirty-two. Only one was missing to complete the pantheon: Vāc herself, the thirty-third.

Prajāpati now began to uncouple himself from her. He was exhausted, he could feel his joints disconnecting. The vital breaths, the Saptarṣis, left him. And with them went the thirty-three deities, trooping off together. Prajāpati was alone once again, as at the beginning, when everything around him was void. He was no longer the only one, but the thirty-fourth, whom they would soon forget to include among the list of gods. And one day, far in the future, certain scholars would say that he was a late and bloodless abstraction, no more than a lucubration of the ritualists.

* * *

“In truth, here at the beginning was asat. To this they say: ‘What was this asat?’ The ṛṣis: they were, at the beginning, the asat. And to this they say: ‘Who were these ṛṣis?’ Now, the ṛṣis are the vital breaths. For before all this they, desiring this, wore themselves out (riṣ-) in toil and ardor, so they are called ṛṣis.”

If asat is an inhabited place, it must certainly also exist, but in special ways. At the beginning it contains only vital breaths, which Indra manages to kindle (indh-). The name ṛṣi is derived from that ardor which is tapas; the name Indra comes from the kindling of the vital breaths. Asat is therefore a place where at the beginning energy is burning. And so from the vital breaths were born “seven persons (puruṣas).” The first beings with bodily features were therefore the ṛṣis: the Saptarṣis, the original Seven Ṛṣis. But the Saptarṣis were immediately aware of their limited power. Generated by the vital breaths, they themselves could not procreate. Their first desire was therefore to act in concert, transforming themselves into a single person. This had to be their task: to compress themselves, condense themselves into one single body, occupying its various parts: “Two above the navel and two below the navel; one on the right side, one on the left side, one at the base.” There was now a body, but it had no head. Still they worked away. From each of them was extracted essence, sap, taste, rasa. And they concentrated it all into the same place, as if into a jar: that was the head. The person made up from the Seven Seers was now complete. And “that same person became Prajāpati.” This was how the Progenitor was created, he who generated everything, including the vital breaths, Indra, and the Saptarṣis who had laboriously created him.

Leaving aside the complications of mutual procreation, by which the Saptarṣis give form to Prajāpati, who in turn would generate them (a regular process in Vedic thought) and leaving aside any consideration of the sequence of time, it seems clear that asat is a place for something that seeks to manifest itself, that burns to manifest itself, but which is prevented from doing so. At the same time, all that forms part of “that which is,” sat, and above all Prajāpati, will owe its origin to asat, which goes back to that obscure period in which the Seven Seers wore themselves out developing an ardor, dedicating themselves to the first of all acts of asceticism, if the word is used once again to mean “exercise,” áskēsis. As for asat, more than nonbeing (in the sense of the mḕ ón in Parmenides), it appears to be closer to something one might call the “unmanifest.”

* * *

Prajāpati is not only “he who finds that which is lost,” but he himself is also the first to be lost. His supernumerary essence is such that at any moment Prajāpati risks being too much. Creatures appear thanks to the superabundance that exists in Prajāpati, but—once their worlds are established—they soon tend to look only after themselves, forgetting their origin. Indeed, they no longer recognize him. It seems they have made Prajāpati suffer even this harsh humiliation. When Prajāpati had finished emanating beings, “he became emaciated. They didn’t recognize him then, since he was emaciated. He anointed his eyes and his limbs.” The last act of the now abandoned Progenitor. Prajāpati went back to being alone, as at the beginning, but now because he was unrecognizable. As he was anointing his eyes and limbs, gaunt and defenseless, Prajāpati was inventing makeup. He was doing these things because he wanted to be recognized again. Men and women would one day try to do the same: “When their eyes and limbs are anointed, they become beautiful: and others notice them.” This is the first éloge du maquillage, whose pathos and frivolity Baudelaire would appreciate.

* * *

What is the horse? It is one of Prajāpati’s eyes that had swollen up and then fallen out. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa doesn’t hesitate for a moment over this statement (nothing is strange for the Vedic ritualist), indeed it moves on immediately to describe the enormous implications: “Prajāpati’s eye became swollen; it fell out: from it was produced the horse; and inasmuch as it swelled up (aśvayat), that is the origin of the horse (aśva). Through the sacrifice of the horse the gods restored it [the eye] to its place; and verily he who performs the horse sacrifice makes Prajāpati complete, and becomes complete himself: and this indeed is atonement for everything, the remedy for everything. With it the gods overcame all evil, they even overcame the killing of a brahmin with it; and he who performs the horse sacrifice overcomes all evil, overcomes the killing of a brahmin.”

The eye swells up because it wants to fall out. And it wants to fall out because it wants to meet another eye—and reflect itself in it. There is no sense producing the world unless there is first of all an eye that looks at it and, in so doing, absorbs Prajāpati in itself, in the same way that Prajāpati absorbs the world in his gaze. At this point Prajāpati and his eye-become-horse are equal and opposite powers, that contain in them (in their own pupil) the image of the other. Paradoxically, however, the horse-born-from-the-eye is whole, complete, but that is not so for Prajāpati, the Progenitor. The wounded orbit of the eye that has fallen out remains open. Prajāpati now wanted to create an eye that would watch him, but he wanted it within himself. It was the first time that any being wanted to make himself a duality of Self and I. For this to happen, the horse-eye had to be reinstated to its original place. The gods would take care of that with the horse sacrifice. The reinstatement of a fragment (the eye) had to be done through the killing of a whole being (the horse).

There is an immense variety of Vedic rites, but all—without a single exception—converge in one action: offering something in the fire. Whether it is milk or sap from a plant or an animal (according to certain texts, also from a human being), the final action is the same. For the Vedic ritualists, killing has not just to do with blood. For them—and they have persistently repeated it, time and again—every offering is a killing. Even the most basic of rites, the agnihotra, the libation of milk in the fire, renews the gesture of Prajāpati, who originally, when nature did not yet exist, offered his own eye to satisfy the hunger of his son Agni: “Prajāpati found nothing that he could sacrifice [to Agni]. He took his own eye and offered it in oblation saying: ‘Agni is the light, the light is Agni, svāhā.’” The eye is the most painful pars pro toto to be chosen by a suicidal god: Prajāpati. The procedures take on a whole variety of forms, the unshakable unity is to be found only in the act of offering in fire.

* * *

Prajāpati not only had the privilege of being abandoned by his children, the beings whom he had just “emanated (asṛjata).” But he also managed to have himself canceled from history for centuries. When his name resurfaced in the pages of late nineteenth-century Western Indologists, their tone was often disparaging. And what appeared most irksome of all were the stories of Prajāpati’s self-emptying after the creation (it is strange that none of these scholars—often devoted Christians—recalled Paul’s description of Christ’s kénōsis: and yet the same word was used). Deussen found these stories “bizarre.” But A. B. Keith went further: he spoke of “stupid myths” with gruff impatience (“the details of these stupid myths are wholly irrelevant”). The idea of a creator who, worn out after his work, turns himself into a horse and hides his face underground for a year, while from his head sprouts a tree, aśvattha (Ficus religiosa), which in turn arouses speculation about the relationship between the horse, aśva, and the tree … well, all of this must have seemed too much for certain austere Western scholars. Where, then, would we draw the line between the great civilizations (such as India) and those primitive peoples for whom, by definition, anything is permissible?

* * *

Creation, for Prajāpati, was not a single act, but a succession of acts. Continually obstructed, often unsuccessful. His exhausting series of creative actions is like the human attempt to put together a series of right gestures: the ritual. In ancient Rome, a ceremony could be repeated as many as thirty times if the gestures and words were not entirely right. For Prajāpati, the greatest obstacle was that of creating beings of a sexual nature. His first creatures could only take care of themselves. They appeared perfect, but soon disappeared (like President Schreber’s “fleeting-improvised-men”). But what was missing? Nipples. Those orifices from which food could be transmitted to other creatures—thus establishing the chain of living creatures. We know very little about the very first attempts, but from various indications they would appear to have been short-lived, as if there was a lack of substance. So the moment arrived when Prajāpati said to himself: “‘I want to create a firm foundation on which the creatures I will emanate shall establish themselves solidly rather than continuing to wander foolishly from place to place without any firm foundation.’ He produced this earthly world, the intermediate world, and the world yonder.” It wasn’t just a matter of obtaining creatures who could last, but of providing them with firm land on which to rest. The earth, the intermediate space, the celestial world were to be that setting, that background.

* * *

Prajāpati’s drama took place without witnesses and continued for a long time, before even the arrival of the gods. It was an autistic drama, which saw no respite nor the consolation of an external viewpoint that could empathize or condemn—it didn’t matter which—but could at least play a part in what was happening. There was no way of distinguishing prodigies or disasters from mirages. And yet they were all that Prajāpati had. This had to be the source for what one day, after long reworking, would naïvely be called reality.

The ritualists soberly relate that: “While he [Prajāpati] was practicing tapas, lights rose up from those armpits of his: and those lights are those stars: there are as many stars as the pores of those armpits; and there are as many of those pores as the muhūrta, the hours, in a thousand years.” That was Prajāpati’s heroic period. He held his arms high, in the darkness, for that is the position of those who invoke and those who make offerings. That is the measure of everything: the measure of a Person with arms held high. Globes of light rose from his armpits and lodged themselves up in the vault of the sky. They designed patterns, gradually illuminating a scene that was still desolate and silent. The first change happened after a thousand years—a breeze. It was “that wind which, blowing, cleanses everything here; and that evil which it cleansed is this body.” The wind that blew after a thousand years of heat and stagnation was certainly a relief for Prajāpati. But we are not told how long it lasted nor whether it succeeded in eliminating—and not simply purifying—evil.

* * *

Prajāpati, a lonely god, the source of all things, is certainly not an omnipotent god. But every action of his is fateful, for he is the founder—and immediately also threatens to be fateful for himself. Producing his firstborn son, Agni, from his mouth, he makes him become a mouth, forced to devour food. From then on, the earth would be a place where someone devours someone else, where fire incessantly consumes something. Agni’s appearance, therefore, from the very first moment, coincides with Death.

The first drama had thus begun, without an audience. Agni is born—and Prajāpati, deep in thought, has doubts about his son. He seems to have difficulty in understanding that, if Agni can do nothing but devour, the only being he’ll be able to devour is his father. Thus we see the first terrifying picture: “Agni turns to him with his mouth wide open.” This gaping mouth of the son, ready to devour his father, is what underlies the whole huge sacrificial construct, as if there would never be sufficient complexity and intricacy to conceal the brutality of that image. What happens afterward is a strange, mysterious process: “His greatness escaped from him [Prajāpati].” The terror had produced in the god a separation, indeed the expulsion of a power, here called “greatness.” What was this greatness? It was Speech, Vāc. A female being that lived in Prajāpati and whom terror had released from within him. And Vāc now stood before him like another being, who spoke to him.

Prajāpati knew it was essential to offer something to stop his son from devouring him. But there was no substance. Only after much rubbing of hands did Prajāpati manage to create something substantial: a liquid much like milk that was the sweat his terror had caused to pour from his skin. Offer it? Or not? At that moment a mighty voice resounded, outside of Prajāpati, and said: “Offer it!” Prajāpati obeyed—and it was then that the world’s fate was decided. As he performed the offering, he realized it was he himself who had spoken: “That voice was his own (sva) greatness which had spoken (āha) to him.” Prajāpati then gave out that sound: svāhā, the quintessential auspicious invocation that has accompanied countless offerings, up to today.

A violent, rushing scene, containing within it the first splitting of personality: if Speech had not been expelled from inside Prajāpati and had not spoken to him, nothing could have persuaded Prajāpati to perform the offering. On the other hand—and here the delicacy of the liturgist is exceptional—so long as Prajāpati, namely the one who had produced everything in the world, including the gods, remained in doubt, “he stayed firm on the better side,” inasmuch as he had caused Speech, Vāc, to come out of himself. And his unknowing saved him.

The scene lets us see the first appearance of the offering as the ultimate means for self-defense. The moment is crucial, since the world from then on will be based on the offering—on an uninterrupted chain of offerings. But another irreversible, less apparent, event had occurred in that scene. And its consequences would be of no less importance. As soon as Prajāpati formed the word svāhā for the first time, it brought self-reflection into existence. “Sva āha,” “that which is his has spoken,” implies the formation of two persons, of a first and a third person within the same mind, which is Prajāpati. All of what we call thought—but also the whole immense, nebulous, frayed extension of mental activity—established then the two poles that would support every instant of awareness. As soon as one recognizes one’s own voice in a separate being, one creates a Double in continual dialogue with the one called I. And the I itself turns out not to be the ultimate, but only the penultimate foundation for what happens in the mind. Alongside an I there will always be a Self—and as well as the Self there will always be an I. That was the moment when they split apart and recognized each other. It was only because Prajāpati’s I was gripped by uncertainty that he could then obey his Self, which spoke to him through Vāc. The ritualist doesn’t want to tell us this explicitly, but this is the nub of the doctrine. Here it appears in its remotest, rawest, most inaccessible form. As well as its decisive form. If Prajāpati had not obeyed that voice, the world would not have managed to be born. The offering was the means, the only possible means for escaping from a deadly threat. A threat for the Progenitor, long before there were people. So people must imitate him performing the agnihotra, pouring milk into the fire, every morning and every evening.

* * *

Prajāpati was laid out and his body was one single pain. The gods approached to relieve his suffering—and perhaps to cure him. They were holding havis, offerings of vegetables, rice, barley, as well as milk, ghee, and cooked foods. With these offerings they wanted to treat Prajāpati’s loosened joints. Especially between day and night, since Prajāpati was made up of time. Hence dawn and dusk. That was the moment to act. So they established the agnihotra, the libation to be performed each day at sunrise and sunset. Then they concentrated on the phases of the moon, which also make time and its junctures visible. Finally they thought about the seasons, their beginnings, discernible and certainly painful in the body of the Progenitor.

The ritual action inevitably took place during those dangerous transitional moments when the presence of time was apparent: entering daylight and leaving it. Agnihotra thus became the most important rite, a cell that unleashed a vast energy, which invaded the totality of time.

* * *

“Prajāpati conceived a passion for his daughter, who was either the Sky or Uṣas, the dawn:

“‘Let me couple with her!’ he thought and he coupled with her.

“This was certainly wrong in the eyes of the gods. ‘He who acts thus toward his own daughter, our sister, [does wrong],’ they thought.

“The gods then said to the god who is lord of the animals: ‘He who acts thus toward his own daughter, our sister, surely does wrong. Pierce him!’ Rudra, having taken aim, pierced him. Half of his seed fell to the ground. And thus it happened.

“In relation to this, the ṛṣi said: ‘When the Father embraced his Daughter, coupling with her, he spilled his seed on the earth.’ This became the chant called āgnimāruta: it shows how the gods made something emerge from that seed. When the anger of the gods subsided, they cured Prajāpati and removed that arrow; for Prajāpati is certainly the sacrifice.

“They said: ‘Think how all of this may not be lost and how it may be a small portion of the offering itself.’

“They said: ‘Take it to Bhaga, who is seated to the south: Bhaga will eat it as a first portion, so that it will be as if it were offered.’ So they carried it to Bhaga, who was sitting to the south. Bhaga looked at it: it burnt out his eyes. And so it was. That is why they say: ‘Bhaga is blind.’

“They said: ‘It has not yet been appeased: take it to Pūṣan.’ So they took it to Pūṣan. Pūṣan tasted it: it broke his teeth. So it was. That is why they say: ‘Pūṣan is toothless.’ And that is why, when they prepare a lump of boiled rice for Pūṣan, they prepare it with ground rice, as is done for someone toothless.

“They said: ‘It has still not been appeased here: take it to Bṛhaspati.’ So they took it to Bṛhaspati. Bṛhaspati hurried to Savitṛ, for Savitṛ is the Impeller. ‘Give impulse to this for me,’ he said. Savitṛ, as the one who gives impulse, therefore gave impulse, and having received impulse from Savitṛ, it did not harm him; that is why since then it is appeased. And this is the first portion.”

The gods already exist, insofar as they are there on the scene, indeed they incite Rudra to shoot their father with his arrow to punish him for the wrong he is doing—certainly not the incest, since further on in the same Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, having reached the story of Manu and the flood, we read that Manu coupled with his daughter and “through her he generated this line [of people], which is the line of Manu; and whatever blessing he invoked through her, everything was granted to him.” On the other hand, it is from the very seed spilled on the ground by the wounded father, at the moment when he separates himself from his daughter, that the gods themselves will then emerge, starting with the Ādityas, the greater gods. And they are born because it is they themselves who stir and warm their father’s puddle of seed, transforming it into a burning lake. It is as if the gods had to be born a second time—and this time from a guilty and interrupted sexual act: as if, in a certain way, they had provoked the violent scene so that they could be born in this new way, which people would one day regard as being quite unnatural.

The gods then experience two successive feelings: anger toward their father and a concern to look after him. The anger corresponds to the violence that is always present in the sacrifice. The healing of the wound, which is the sacrifice itself, would instead be the element of salvation implicit in the sacrifice. The two elements coexist in the tiny fragment of flesh torn from Prajāpati’s body where he had been pierced by the arrow. That is the very flesh of the sacrifice, since “Prajāpati surely is this sacriﬁce,” but the metal arrowhead is hurled from another world: Prajāpati is the hunter hunted, the sacriﬁcer sacriﬁced. This is unbearable even for the gods. That scrap of flesh is like an intolerable ultrasound that overwhelms them. The sacrifice is more powerful than the gods.

But this much was needed to form the first portion of the sacrifice, the first fruit that contained within it the devastating power and meaning of the whole thing: “Now, when [the officiant] cuts the first portion (prāśitra), he cuts that which is wounded in the sacrifice, that which belongs to Rudra.” Sacrifice is a wound—and the attempt to heal a wound. It is a guilty act—and an attempt to amend it. “That which is wounded in the sacrifice, that belongs to Rudra”: the work of the brahmins, and of everyone else, is always a vain attempt to heal a wound that is inherent in the very act when existence emerges, not only prior to mankind, but prior to the gods. The gods, then, were only spectators and instigators. Prajāpati, Rudra, and Uṣas were actors. And the scene was a world before the world, a world that will never become identical to the world.

* * *

The cosmic balance is kept by two tiny entities of huge power: the grain of barley in the heart, of which the Upaniṣads will speak, capable of spreading beyond all worlds, and the prāśitra, the “first portion” to which the brahmin is entitled, that scrap of Prajāpati’s flesh torn by the tip of Rudra’s arrow. It is also said that it has to be as big as a grain of barley or a pippal (Ficus religiosa) berry.

There is something excessive, corrosive, about that part of Rudra. And yet it was necessarily the first offering of the sacrifice. Without that beginning, the whole work would have been futile. But that first offering was what is intractable, uncontrollable. The gods were already in despair. They were already yielding to a pure force that was overwhelming them. At that moment the supreme astuteness of the brahmin was apparent. For some time Bṛhaspati had been performing rites for the gods. They hadn’t yet realized that this gave him wisdom greater than theirs. Bṛhaspati had the help of Savitṛ, the Impeller, but then he was the first and only one to let his mouth touch that tiny scrap of flesh. He ate it, he said, “with Agni’s mouth”: fire with fire. But he dared not chew it. Then he rinsed his mouth with water, in silence. The gods understood at once why the brahmins are indispensable. They understood that the brahmin is “the best physician” for the sacrifice. Without him it wouldn’t have been possible to take a single step. For them, every possible task was a sacrifice, but the sacrifice could not be performed without the help of the being who dared to let his mouth touch the scrap of wounded flesh. In their purity, in the whiteness of their garments, the brahmins from then on carried with them the memory of the gesture by which the blood of the wound had for the first time disappeared into one of them, who had absorbed it without it destroying him. And from then on they would sometimes display a certain arrogance toward even the gods.

The brahmin is different from all others because his physical makeup is such that he can take poison that would kill anyone else. Śiva managed to drink the poison of the world in the same way, which then turned his neck blue. Although Śiva and the brahmins would show themselves to be fierce rivals in various circumstances, it was not enough to hide their basic complicity: that of being the only ones able to absorb the poison of the world. The brahmin does not act, except when he alone can act, as in the case of the prāśitra, which can be eaten only by him. He does not speak, except when he alone can speak—and this occurs if errors are made in carrying out the sacrifice. The brahmin then has three possible invocations—bhūr, bhuvas, svar—which operate as medicines applied to the loosened joints of the ceremony. Those words cannot be confused with the other words of the liturgy. The brahmin’s speech “is filled with the limitless unspoken, anirukta, of which silence is the emblem.” As bearer of the “limitless unspoken,” the brahmin is the direct representative of Prajāpati. When Prajāpati disappears from mythology, and his place is taken by Brahmā, the brahmins will remain.

Otherwise, the brahmin silently watches what is happening. He is seated to the south, for that is the dangerous area, from which an attack may come at any time. From whom? When the gods were officiating, they were frightened of being ambushed by the anti-gods, the Asuras and the Rakṣas, the wicked demons. Men, on the other hand, must watch out for the “malevolent rival”: generally speaking, the enemy, the adversary, the ever-present shadow in every liturgical celebration.

The brahmin is the “guardian” of the sacrifice. In this respect he is like the Saptarṣis, who keep watch over the earth from the seven stars high up in the Great Bear. His silence likens him to Prajāpati and keeps him away from the throng of the gods. All the brahmin’s tasks are reduced to one: to heal the wound that is the sacrifice. It is his main concern that the wound be inflicted in the right way, and he thus oversees the actions and words of the other priests. Finally he reassembles the tattered sacrifice by cloaking it in silence.

* * *

There are many paradoxes in the relationship between Prajāpati and Mṛtyu, Death (a male being). Prajāpati was given a lifespan of a thousand years when he was born. And since a thousand indicates totality, it might be thought that this indicates a limitless period. But when Prajāpati devoted himself to producing creatures, when he was pregnant with them, Death appeared in the background and seized them one by one. The result of the duel was obvious: “While Prajāpati was producing living beings, Mṛtyu, Death, that evil, overpowered him.” Prajāpati was therefore defeated and thwarted during the very process of creation. For a thousand years he had to practice tapas to overcome the evil of Death. But which years are being referred to? Are they the same thousand years that marked his lifespan? Prajāpati’s life in that case would have been one long, relentless struggle fighting the—already established—supremacy of Death. The life of the one to whom creatures owe their lives would therefore have been most of all an attempt to respond to Death and to avoid his power.

With what means did Prajāpati create beings and worlds, in his repeated attempts? With “ardor,” tapas, and with the “vision” of ritual. Connected acts: ardor stirs vision, vision heightens ardor. There is no trace of a will, of a supreme and abstract decision imposed from outside. Or rather: all will is a “desire,” kāma, which is developed in ardor and emerges in vision. No will can be split away from its elaborate physiology.

* * *

Death is not an intrinsic part of divinity, but is an intrinsic part of creation (since successful creation is sexual: in the same way, in the natural world, death will appear together with sexual reproduction). There is no creation without death—and death dwells not only in creatures but also in their Progenitor. So the gods, children of Prajāpati, accused him of creating Death. They were sometimes obsessed by the notion that Prajāpati was himself Death. But, as always with children, they knew little of their father’s past. The fact that he was Year, therefore Time, exposed him to continual disintegration. He could not avoid coexisting with those two inveterate parasites, whom he himself had created but who lurked within him and similarly went to lurk in every other created being.

The connection between evil and Mṛtyu, Death, as well as that between death and desire finally became clear when it was realized that “Death is hunger.” This revelation summed up the bond between desire and evil, through Death. Hunger is a desire, but a desire that involves killing, for it makes something disappear. The inevitability of that Evil which is Death was thus found in the first desire to prolong and perpetuate life, which is hunger.

* * *

Men complained, as the gods had already done, that their father, Prajāpati, had also created Mṛtyu, Death. They always remembered that: “Above creatures, [Prajāpati] created Death as the one who devours them.” But Prajāpati was also the first to feel a terror of Death, which dwelt within him, even though wrapped in something immortal. That part of him feared Death with the same intensity and violence that would later be experienced by humans. The first to escape into hiding—before Agni, Indra, or Śiva—was Prajāpati, who, to escape Death, became water and clay. The earth was first created as a refuge from the fear of Death. And yet Death was benevolent toward Prajāpati. It reassured the gods that it would not hurt him. It knew, in fact, that Prajāpati was protected by the immortal part of him. But Death went further: it invited the gods to seek out their lost father, it invited them to put him back together. The fire altar therefore not only saved Prajāpati from agony, but it put his dismembered body back together at the instigation of Death. An ambiguity that would never be dispelled. After all, Death, of all of his children, had been the first to ask where their father had disappeared. Meanwhile the gods had perhaps already begun to feel the indifference they would later show toward their father. But they set to work and, layer by layer, arranged the bricks of the altar of fire one upon the other.

* * *

It was Prajāpati who defeated Mṛtyu, Death, in an interminable and inconclusive duel (“they continued for many years without succeeding for long in being triumphant”). In the end Death took refuge in the women’s hut. But elsewhere, in other stories (earlier? later? contemporaneous?), Prajāpati is Death. As such, he terrified not just men but also the gods: “The gods were frightened of this Prajāpati, the Year, Death, the Ender, fearing that he, through day and night, might bring an end to their lives.” Various rites were invented to erase—or at least alleviate—the fear: the agnihotra, the New Moon and the Full Moon sacrifice, the animal sacrifice, the soma sacrifice. But they ended in a succession of failures: “In offering these sacrifices they did not attain immortality.”

It was Prajāpati himself who taught the gods and people how to go further. He had seen them busy building a brick altar, but they continually got the size and shape wrong. Like a patient father, Prajāpati told them: “You do not arrange me in all my forms, you make me either too large or not large enough: and so you do not become immortal.” But what should the right form be? That which would succeed in completely filling the cavity of time, by stacking as many bricks as there are hours in the year: 10,800. That was the number of bricks lokampṛṇā, “that fill the space.” And this time the gods succeeded in becoming immortal.

Mṛtyu was worried. He thought that men who imitated the gods would one day have been able to become immortal themselves. So “Death said to the gods: ‘Surely in this way all men will become immortal and what then will be my part?’ They said: ‘From now on no one will be immortal in their body: only when you have taken the body as your part will they who are to become immortal, either through knowledge or through sacred works, become immortal after being separated from their body.’” Even when all the calculations are right, even when the 10,800 + 360 + 36 bricks match Prajāpati’s instructions one by one, the final interlocutor is always Death. He had no intention of relinquishing his part, simply because the gods had become masters in creating forms. If men had now succeeded, through stacking bricks, in becoming immortal, Death would have lost his purpose, like an idle shepherd abandoned by his flock. The gods saw an opportunity here for establishing another obstacle for mankind. They had no intention of watching their own hard-earned privileges being eroded. So a pact was sealed, over the heads of men, between Death and the gods. Yes, men would become immortal, but without their bodies. The mortal remains were surrendered to Death forever. And this is the point that has always made every promise of immortality doubtful. Men in fact preferred their ephemeral bodies to the splendors of the spirit. They distrusted disembodied souls, vaguely tiresome and sinister entities. So the agreement between the gods and Death was seen as a trick.

The celestial immortality granted by the gods to mankind was a reduced immortality. Over the course of time, the celestial body was destined to dwindle and disintegrate. There would be a renewed attraction toward the earth, like a powerful downward suction. Life would begin again in other forms. But death would also be repeated. In this way people ended up seeing their many lives essentially as a sequence of deaths. And they thought that celestial immortality was not enough to escape from repeated death. They had to free themselves from life itself.

Already in the Brāhmaṇas—and not just in the Upaniṣads—the real enemy is not Death, Mṛtyu, but “recurring death,” punarmṛtyu. The obsession with the chain of deaths—and therefore of births—is not Buddhist, but Vedic. The Buddha formulated a radically different way of escaping from the chain. But the doctrine that had prevailed before him was no less bold.

* * *

What happened to Death after the exhausting duel with Prajāpati, after he had taken refuge in the women’s hut? No one ever saw him leave, even to this day. That doesn’t mean that Death disappeared. To see him, all we have to do is look up. The sunlight dazzles us in a diffused glow. But within it we can make out a black circle. It stays, persistently, in the eye. It is a figure, a man in the Sun: that is Death. And it will always be there, for “Death does not die,” protected all around it by the immortal. This is its challenging paradox: the endlessness of the shell also guarantees the endlessness of what it conceals—in this case, Death. When one celebrates the immortal, then at the same time—without knowing it—one celebrates Death, which is “within the immortal.”

* * *

“Prajāpati was burning while he was creating the living beings here. From him, exhausted and overheated, Śrī, Splendor, came forth. She lay there, resplendent, glistening and trembling. The gods, seeing her so resplendent, glistening and trembling, fixed their minds upon her.

“They said to Prajāpati: ‘Let us kill her and take all this away from her.’ He said: ‘This Śrī is a woman and people do not kill a woman, but instead take everything from her and leave her alive.’”

Śrī, the splendor of the world, was the first to be robbed. She was a radiant young girl, who quivered in solitude, while eager eyes stared at her. Their first thought was to kill her. Straightaway they told her father. Prajāpati was dying. He was thinking of his own death. Creation had torn him from inside. And now his children had come asking his approval because they wanted to kill his last, his youngest daughter. Prajāpati knew anger and fury would have no effect on the gods. They were too greedy. They were, after all, beings without qualities, they still had to conquer charm and power. They were little different than street robbers, who were bound to turn up sooner or later, though people didn’t yet exist—not even bandits. So Prajāpati said: “Killing a woman is something you don’t do. But robbing her of all she has, right down to the thinnest anklet, that’s all right.” The gods followed the advice of their father, whom they already scorned—after all, he was the only being who knew anything. The gods knew only that they were the world’s parvenus. They left, persuaded by their father.

There were ten of them—nine male and one female. They surrounded Śrī and overpowered her. Each of her attackers had something particular they wanted to steal. Śrī was left abandoned, trembling more than ever. But she was still resplendent, since, for every shimmer of light they stripped from her, another appeared. And yet she was unaware of it. Desperate, humiliated, she too decided to ask her father’s advice. Prajāpati was still dying. Everything had happened as he had expected. Now he had to give his daughter the best advice. Śrī could never retrieve her superb ornaments by force. They would have laughed in her face. The kinder ones would have asked for something in exchange. So Prajāpati suggested the idea of sacrifice. In a desolate clearing she had to prepare a certain number of offerings. Modest, laid out on potsherds. But what else was there around? Brushwood and sand. Like a diligent girl in her home kitchen, Śrī prepared offerings to the ten beings who had attacked her. Humbly, she asked back various parts of herself, such as her Sovereignty and her Beautiful Form. The gods listened to her invocations in silence—and they admired her precision. Then, cautiously, they approached and accepted her poor offerings. Śrī could gradually dress herself once again in her glistening wrappings. But this did not deprive the gods of them. Each would continue to preside over those splendors—at least as long as other beings (humans, for example) continued, after Śrī, to present their offerings, ideally on a more lavish scale.

“In the beginning,” agre, the sacrifice, was a stratagem suggested by Prajāpati to his daughter as a response to the greediness of the gods. Human beings did not play a part in it until very much later—and then only as imitators of those events. The act preceding every act was one of violence, of prolonged pain, whose consequences were to be remedied, mitigated. “What appears, at the very moment it appears, is ready for robbery,” thought Prajāpati, who had been the first to suffer it himself, insofar as they had robbed him of himself without a second thought. The same had happened to his daughter. But, if the world wanted to exist, if it wanted to have a history and some kind of meaning, everything that had emerged from Prajāpati and had then disappeared like stolen goods had to be rediscovered and restored. A lengthy undertaking, as long as the world itself. For all to be well, other things—perhaps some water or a rice cake—had to be consumed, destroyed. The sacrifice was a task to be carried out every day. That was the task, the only task. Every action, every gesture would be a part of it. This was what Prajāpati thought, lying there abandoned.

* * *

What happened to Prajāpati at the end of his thousand lonely and agonizing years? The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa notes: “In regard to this, it is said in the Ṛgveda: ‘The labor that the gods look upon with favor is not in vain’: for in truth, for him who knows this, there is no laboring in vain and the gods look with favor on his every action.” This comment comes at the end of the account of the thousand years Prajāpati spent practicing tapas, while weighed down by Death. And it is an answer to the first doubt that worried the ritualists: is tapas effective? And will it always be effective? Prajāpati’s tapas was enough to create the world: but will the tapas of men in some way inherit its effectiveness? The answer is in the verse of the Ṛgveda: there is nothing automatic in the effectiveness of tapas, which is labor, an exemplary striving, but an effort that may also be pointless, insofar as nothing is effective unless the gods look on it with favor. At the same time, the gods cannot but look favorably on the efforts of “he who knows thus”: knowledge in some way compels the gods, forces them to look with everlasting favor on “he who knows thus.” The gods therefore fear the knowledge of men. In the face of knowledge, they know they cannot resist.

* * *

When Prajāpati was dismembered, the sequence of the scenes that took place varies between different sacred texts. With Agni, the firstborn son, who immediately wanted to devour his father, there was the irrepressible tension of the drama between father and son, reduced to its basic elements. All around, everything was empty and desolate. With the other children, the Devas, once again the scenes were fraught with drama, yet with a streak of comedy—and of macabre humor, if only in the picture of the children running away, anxious and furtive, clutching some fragment of their father’s body. But with the Gandharvas and the Apsaras, we enter phantasmagoria. Here, the painter called upon to celebrate the event might easily have been Fuseli. From Prajāpati’s aching limbs, the Gandharvas and the Apsaras came out in pairs, like a corps de ballet, models for all Genies and Nymphs. They held each other by the waist—they were the first couples. Nor did they worry about stealing some fragment of their father’s body. First of all, they were “perfume,” gandha, and “beauteous form.” This marked the beginning of erotica: “From then on, anyone who seeks out his companion desires sweet perfume and beauteous form.”

But the dying father was watching them and was already thinking how to capture them, how to reabsorb them into his own body, from which they had come. But this time there was no fight, nor even any bargaining, as had been the case with Agni, with the Devas, with the Asuras. This time everything took place as if in a Busby Berkeley routine. Prajāpati chose encirclement. And the weapon used for encircling Genies and Nymphs would be the chariot, soon to be packed, teeming, with those fickle, reckless beings. In turn, “this chariot is the yonder sun.” And in its light the soft bodies of the Apsaras became moths. In this way Prajāpati reclaimed those countless demonic beings who had left him, bound together in pairs.

* * *

After creating living beings, Prajāpati had witnessed a cruel spectacle: “Varuṇa captured them [with his noose]; and, once captured by Varuṇa, they swelled up.” These hydropics had to be cured with varuṇapraghāsa oblations, one of which involved sprinkling karīra berries (from the caper family) on certain dishes of curded milk: “Then follows a cake on a potsherd for Ka; for, by that cake on a potsherd for Ka, Prajāpati granted happiness (ka) to the creatures, and so now the sacrificer grants happiness to the creatures by that cake on a potsherd. This is the reason there is a cake on a potsherd for Ka.” That cake on a potsherd served to indicate something that might otherwise have been overlooked. People had already realized that the mystery of identity didn’t lie in the gods, but in their Progenitor: Prajāpati. But now, beyond that name, which was more an appellative, another name was discovered, which was an interrogative pronoun: Ka, Who? And beyond that? No other names were known. This was the indefinite, limitless outpouring that was the very nature of Prajāpati. A nature that made it necessary to move one step further than the gods. But in what direction? Little was known about Prajāpati, as regards his boundless immensity. And, of that little, what stood out was the suffering, the long torment of his dismembered and ulcerated body. What else? Pure desire—or desire developed in arduous, enervating tapas. He was thus to be approached with caution, as when someone is in pain. And here the unexpected was revealed: Ka also means happiness. So karīra berries were sprinkled on curds: to confer happiness on living creatures. This was surprising enough. He who was the image of agony became the path to happiness. But what was happiness? Prajāpati’s children, for example, seemed to know only hunger or flight. Yet now they discovered that concealed in their father was something else, the syllable ka in the karīra plant. How can one reach it? Prajāpati once answered the question with the precision of a surveyor: “However much you offer, that is my happiness.” Happiness appeared to be connected, firmly bound up with the offering. And the offering was first that brick construction in which Prajāpati’s body was reassembled. In fact: “Inasmuch as for him there was happiness (ka) in what was offered (iṣṭa), therefore they are bricks (iṣṭakā).” The word describing the bricks of the fire altar thus encapsulated within itself, with the most powerful link, that of one syllable with the next, the offering (iṣṭi) and happiness (ka). Thereby meaning “happiness in the offering.” The father’s phrase was a surprise that became etched on the memory of his children. From then onward they busied themselves, as never before, around the fire altar; they learned to lay out a composition of happy bricks, for they stubbornly sought to reassemble the lost identity of their father. Only in that way would they restore happiness to him, only in that way would happiness have descended upon them, through that cake laid out on a potsherd.

* * *

But the linguistic speculation of the ritualists is relentless. A further meaning emerges in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. And it comes from the highest authority, the fires that the student Upakosala had tended for twelve years while he was a novice at the house of Satyakāma Jābāla. The master had taken leave from his disciples, all except Upakosala, who pined and refused to eat. The master’s wife asked him why and Upakosala replied: “In this person there are many desires. I am full of illness. I will not eat.” It was then that the fires decided to intervene. They were thankful to the pupil who had carefully tended them. They wanted to explain to him, in the fewest words, something essential. They said: “Brahman is breath, brahman is happiness (ka), brahman is space (kha).” The pupil remained puzzled. He said: “I know that brahman is breath. But I do not know what are ka and kha.” The fires answered: “What is ka is kha, what is kha is ka.” The text adds: “They therefore explained to him breath and space.” From linguistic commentaries (Bṛhaddevatā and Nirukta) we learn that Ka was also kāma, “desire,” and sukha, “happiness.” But now kha, “space,” was also found in the same name. And what this was is explained at a crucial point in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad: “Brahman is kha, space; space is primordial, space is windswept.”

Etymologists and lexicographers help us approach certain telling details that the ritualists do not always make clear. Behind the dismembered body of Prajāpati, who “has run the whole race” and has ended up falling on his own eye, from which food flowed forth as if it were tears (“From him, thus fallen, food flowed forth: it was from his eye on which he lay that the food flowed”), behind his indistinct figure from whom his son Indra soon sought to take away greatness and splendor, one began to see a boundless extension of desire, over and above which was a happiness that came before all existence, in a space that came before everything and was able to contain everything, in a perpetual circulation of winds. And this was Ka.

Ka, kha: written differently, sounding almost the same, those two syllables, put together, had to heal all sadness. Why? In ka, Prajāpati loomed this time only in the shadows, whereas the meaning of “happiness,” sukha, was clearly apparent. Happiness spread out into space (kha)—and space allowed happiness to breathe. On another occasion, another master explained to Upakosala the simple opening of space called kha (which also means “orifice,” “wound,” “zero”).

But how does brahman appear in kha, in “open space”? In the form of an hourglass. Its upper part extends out into the totality of outer space. Its neck narrows to a point that is almost imperceptible, in a minuscule cavity in the heart of each person. Behind it there opens up an immensity equivalent to that of the outside world. This is the lower part of the hourglass. The grain of mustard, of which the Upaniṣads (and the Gospels) speak, passes through the neck and extends out into the invisible. One passage in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad states all this (a revelation that shatters all previous thinking) in the quietest, most direct way, as in a calm, persuasive conversation: “That which is called brahman is this space, ākāśa, which is outside man. This space which is outside man is the same as the one within man. And this space within man is the same as that inside the heart. It is what is full, unchangeable.” The aura that surrounds people is the impression that allows us to detect the presence of the lower part of the hourglass. For the German romantics, inner exploration was a relentless search for the neck of the hourglass, without the assistance of rituals and fires.

* * *

Arka: a word belonging to a secret language, about which we know little. It was familiar to Armand Minard, the most austere priest of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, who dedicated his life’s work to a word-by-word commentary on it, with the perverse satisfaction of making it even more inaccessible: “arká-: ray (flash of lightning, flame, fire, sun),—plant whose flamed leaves carry the offering to Rudra in his lustral century (śatarudriya),—laud, hymn (= uktha), which is perhaps the first meaning (Ren. JAs 1939 344 n. 1). This polysemy opens up endless speculations (thus X 6 2 5-10). And the word (almost: 525 a) always, as here (and 363), taken in two or more senses.” These words are a comment on the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 10, 3, 4, 3 (“Do you know the arka? So, may your Lordship deign to teach it to us”) and they make us feel the rapturous shiver of Minard’s philology. In contrast, Stella Kramrisch has another style: “Arka is anything that radiates. It is ray, splendor, and lightning. It is the song.”

The passage Minard comments on is a provocative example of a series of riddles, where the human body appears behind the description of arka as a flower, Calotropis gigantea (“Do you know the flowers of the arka? With this he meant the eyes”—and so forth for the other organs), and behind the arka can be seen the profile of Agni, up to the last comparison: “He who regards Agni as arka and as man, in his body this Agni, the arka, will be built up through the knowledge that ‘I here am Agni, the arka.” But also to be found in arka were Ka as well as ka, “happiness.” Immediately after the opening of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad—an overwhelming procession of divinities led by the young girl called Dawn, Uṣas, who reveals herself to be “the head of the sacrificial horse”—we move on to arka: “In the beginning there was nothing here below. Everything was wrapped in Death [Mṛtyu], in hunger, for hunger is Death. He [Mṛtyu] had this thought: ‘Let me have a Self.’ So he began to pray. And, while he was praying, waters were generated. He said: ‘While I was praying [arc-] happiness came to me [ka; this according to Senart, but ka also means ‘water,’ and so Olivelle translates the passage: ‘While I was occupied in a liturgical recital, water poured forth from me’].’ This is where the name arka comes from. Happiness goes to the one who knows thus why arka is called arka [Olivelle is in difficulty here, so that he has to translate as follows: ‘Water pours forth from the one who knows thus’].”

But the story carries on: “The froth of the waters solidified and was land. On the land he [Mṛtyu] toiled. When he was exhausted and hot, the essence of his brilliance became fire.” After the waters and the land, other parts of the world were formed: the sun, the wind. It was the breath of life that broke down into pieces. Death then wished: “Let me give birth to a second Self. Death, which is hunger, coupled mentally (manasā) in coitus (mithunam) with Speech, Vāc. That which was the seed became the Year.” Speech, Vāc, as a daughter with whom to have immediate intercourse, then the appearance of Time (Year): we have already come across this in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, the long text of which the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad forms the final part. There, however, it was all about Prajāpati; here it is Mṛtyu, Death, who continues to behave like Prajāpati. He practices tapas, becomes exhausted, dismembered. “The breaths: splendor, energy” flee from his body. His body swells, as also happens in the stories about Prajāpati. It is a carcass, but his mind is still in it. Mṛtyu then decided to make another body for himself. He formulated the same words in his mind as he had spoken at the beginning: “Let me have a Self.” He then became a horse, aśva, since he had “swollen,” aśvat. And once Mṛtyu has swollen up in the horse, he can sacriﬁce it, since “what was swollen had become fit for sacrifice (medhya).” This is the origin of the “horse sacrifice,” aśvamedha. Here we sense the action of the same coded, lightning process that operated for the word arka. The text, in fact, immediately points it out: “They are two, arka and aśvamedha, but there is one single divinity, which is Mṛtyu.” Throughout, up to the institution of the aśvamedha, which is the greatest of all sacrifices, Mṛtyu and Prajāpati have each followed in the footsteps of the other, like two doubles. But only now, in the Upaniṣad of the Forest, is the piercing obsession of the Vedic ritualists given form, which in the Brāhmaṇas appears only fleetingly: “recurring death,” punarmṛtyu, the greatest of all ills that can be suffered. And the power that makes it possible to escape it is Mṛtyu, Death, itself: “He [who knows this] avoids recurring death, death cannot reach him, Mṛtyu becomes his Self, he who knows thus becomes one of these divinities.”

How was this astonishing reversal reached, through which Death became liberation from death? It was a process with various stages. In the beginning, “Prajāpati created living creatures: from upward breaths he produced the gods, from downward breaths mortals. And, over living creatures, he created Death as the one who devours them.” Farther on, the same kāṇḍa of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa speaks of Prajāpati who, “having created living things, felt emptied and was frightened of Death.” Later, it says: “Death, which is evil (pāpmā mṛtyuḥ)” overcame Prajāpati while he was creating. The farther we venture in the text, the closer Mṛtyu comes to Prajāpati and surrounds him: an impending presence, finally a dueling presence. When we reach the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, the situation is reversed: there is no more mention of Prajāpati, it is now Mṛtyu—and it is Death who now submits to all the tests, to all the labors faced by Prajāpati. Does this mean the Upaniṣad radically changes viewpoint? Definitely not. Everything had already been established. Back in the tenth kāṇḍa of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa we read that Prajāpati is “the Year, Death, the Ender.”

* * *

At the age of eight, the young brahmin came before the master and said: “I am here to become a pupil.” The master then asked him: “Ka (Who, What) is your name?” The question included the answer: “Ka is your name.” At that moment the pupil came under the shadow of Prajāpati, taking even his name: “Thus he makes him one belonging to Prajāpati and initiates him.” Everything else was a consequence. The master took his pupil’s right hand and said: “You are a disciple of Indra. Agni is your master.” Powerful divinities, who cast a shadow. And in that shadow were Prajāpati and the pupil himself, who was about to undergo a long transformation. It would last twelve years.

* * *

“Prajāpati is truly that sacrifice which is performed here; and from which these creatures are born: and likewise they are born again today.” These clear-cut words are found three times within a few pages. They sound like a warning, an opening chord. They remind us that Prajāpati’s theology is above all a liturgy. It is not just a matter of reconstructing Prajāpati’s original actions in which living beings were created. It is now a matter of carrying out corresponding actions so that living beings continue to be produced. Prajāpati’s action is uninterrupted and perpetual. It is the action that is carried out in the mind, in every mind, whether it knows it or not, when forms break away from its inarticulate and borderless dominion—forms that have an outline and stand out among everything else.

* * *

For the Vedic seers, cosmogony was not the traditional tale of primordial times, but a literary genre that allowed for an indefinite number of variants. And all were compatible—iva, “so to speak.” Or at least, all converged on one ever-present point—the sacrifice. Sacrifice was the breath of the multiple cosmogonies: stories of a specific sacrifice that at the same time were the foundation of the sacrifice. There are many different versions in one and the same work about what originally happened to Prajāpati. And each new version is meant to explain some detail about the world as it is. If the stories about Prajāpati were not so richly varied, the world would be poorer, less vital, less capable of metamorphosis. The more variegated the origin, the denser and more impenetrable is the texture of everything. It is generally described as “the three worlds”: the sky, the earth, and atmospheric space. All that happens takes place between these three layers of reality. And this would be quite enough to complicate the picture, since the relationships between the three levels are extremely dense.

But the ritualist is a man of doubt. For every movement he performs, he is goaded by a question: is this the gesture to perform? Will this gesture cover the whole of reality? Or will there still be a further reality that this gesture cannot touch? Hence, at one point, the ritualist refers to a fourth world. If this world existed, it would be a disturbing revelation, since everything done up to that point had involved only three worlds. Isn’t the mere existence of the fourth enough to frustrate such a vision? And won’t perhaps the fourth world feel outraged about never having been taken into consideration? Yet “uncertain it is whether the fourth world exists.” An irresolvable doubt as to the very existence of an entire world is therefore acknowledged. What should be done? The ritualist is used to opening up a way—perhaps a temporary one—through this maze. If the existence of the fourth world is uncertain, then “uncertain is also what is done in silence.” A further movement must then be added to the movements carried out while reciting a formula, which is done in silence. That gesture will be the recognition that the fourth world might exist. That is enough to go further, on toward other gestures. But that silent doubt lingers behind all speculation. Until all of a sudden, from one side, and with a nonchalance typical of the esoteric, a sentence appears with the long-awaited answer: “Prajāpati is the fourth world, beside and beyond these three.” The answers to riddles have a peculiar feature: they become riddles themselves, and even more far-reaching. This is the case here. If Prajāpati is the “fourth world”—and the existence of the fourth world is “uncertain”—the existence of Prajāpati himself would be uncertain. If we trace back to the one who created living beings, we do not encounter something more sure and solid, but something whose existence we can indeed legitimately put in doubt, something we can nevertheless ignore without this upsetting in any way the workings of everything, of those “three worlds” with which we are constantly involved. The theological daring of the ritualists is dazzling: implicit in the mystery is its capacity to instill doubt as to its own existence, the ability to allow everything to exist without having to refer to the mystery itself. Nothing protects a mystery better than the denial of its very existence.

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Prajāpati: the background noise of existence, the steady hum that goes before every sound graph, the silence behind which we perceive the workings of a mind that is the mind. It is the id of what happens, a fifth column that spies on and sustains every event.